INNOVATIVE TEACHING SHOWCASE

Larry Estrada is an associate professor and director of the American Cultural Studies program at Fairhaven College, and is the president of the National Association for Ethnic Studies. His scholarship focuses on the impacts of changing demographics on our country's social, cultural and economic climate.

Edward Vajda is a professor, director of East Asian Studies, Russian Language section coordinator for the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at WWU, and editor of Word, the journal of the International Linguistics Association. His scholarship focuses on native Siberian peoples and languages, including the Ket people, who inhabit the Yenisei Basin in central Siberia.

Kathleen Young is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at WWU. Her cultural anthropological research focuses on the global issues of genocide, war, death and dying, and rape, religion and Islamic Law.

One of the challenges to diverse democratic nation-states is to provide opportunities for different groups to maintain aspects of their community cultures while at the same time building a nation in which these groups are structurally included and to which they feel allegiance. A delicate balance of diversity and unity should be an essential goal of democratic nation-states and of teaching and learning in a democratic society.